The Bride! (15)

In 1930s Chicago, desperately lonely monster Frank tracks down "mad scientist" Dr Euphronious and pleads with her to find him a companion. The doctor realises that Frank means to reanimate a dead woman and she bypasses her Igor-like assistant, Greta, to assist Frank in digging up the body of murdered good time gal Ida. A huge electrical discharge returns Ida to the land of the living. She is possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley and becomes a fugitive from the law with Frank,

LondonNet Film Review

The Bride! (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Over the end credits of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audacious reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror Frankenstein and the 1935 film Bride Of Frankenstein, Bobby “Boris” Pickett recounts a macabre tale of vampires, baying hounds and coffin-bangers in his novelty song Monster Mash. “It was a graveyard smash!” booms Pickett. “It caught on in a flash!” The Bride! gleefully smashes skulls and offers flashes of creative brilliance but Gyllenhaal’s achingly stylish experiment in reanimation suffers a similar fate to Frankenstein’s woebegotten creature…

A curious black-and-white framing device introduces Jessie Buckley as writer Shelley, who feels robbed of precious time by her brain tumour. “Darlings, be warned. The sequel is coming!” she whoops, referring to Frankenstein. In 1930s Chicago, desperately lonely monster Frank (Christian Bale) tracks down “mad scientist” Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening) and pleads to find him a companion. “I don’t run a mail order catalogue for fallen women,” chuckles the mad medic. Dr Euphronious realises that Frank means to reanimate a dead woman and she bypasses her Igor-like assistant, Greta (Jeannie Berlin), to assist Frank in digging up a freshly lowered coffin. Inside, they find the body of murdered good time gal Ida (Buckley again).

A huge electrical discharge returns Ida to the land of the living. She is possessed by the spirit of Shelley and becomes a fugitive from the law with Frank, remaining one small step ahead of police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his partner Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz), who is repeatedly overlooked by virtue of her sex. As Frank and his bride gain notoriety, their paths cross with dreamy Hollywood matinee idol Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). Meanwhile, menacing crime boss (Zlatko Buric) dispatches two lackeys (John Magaro, Matthew Maher) to permanently silence loose-lipped Ida.

The Bride! elopes from conventional storytelling from the opening scene of Shelley debating with herself whether to spin us a horror yarn or a love story. Stitched and stapled seams between genres are glaringly apparent, and more than once, the film comes apart before our eyes. Hot on the heels of a stellar performance in Hamnet, Buckley is transcendent as a puppet of cruel fate, who is revived by weird science without her consent. She is the electricity that powers Gyllenhaal’s picture through its wild excesses – which include a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style musical sequence with hundreds of dancers.

Bale shuffles, drools and rages with fierce intensity while the writer-director corrals her husband (Sarsgaard) and brother Jake for notable supporting roles. Cruz and Bening make bigger impacts with their characters’ more detailed back stories. One line of dialogue in Gyllenhaal’s script is distractingly on the nose as the filmmaker draws heavy-handed parallels between Ida’s rejection of a patriarchy that callously discards women like unwanted toy dolls and transformational modern-day movements for meaningful social change. Are you befuddled and mesmerised? Me too.

– Jo Planter